Month: May 2017

The U.S. isn’t the only market where media companies are consolidating to offer an advertising platform to rival Facebook and Google.
While AOL (which owns TechCrunch) is in the process of acquiring Yahoo, over in Malaysia a similar consolidation was announced this week — although not quite on the scale of AOL-Yahoo (Oath?!) and its $4.48 billion price tag. Media Prima, a… Read More

When Snap went public earlier this year, it revealed a break-neck level of growth in its nascent advertising business — and a dramatic burn rate along with it. But while it’ll be important for Snap to continue growing that business and get its costs in check, it’ll be nearly as important to convince Madison Ave. that it can be a mainstay ad buy alongside the big two (Facebook… Read More

With titanium 3D printers, electrostatic charge tables, and a giant slide, Playground Global lives up to it’s a name. Here we take you on a tour of Android operating system inventor Andy Rubin’s hardware startup incubator that’s backed by a $300 million fund. Check out how the whimsical space lets scrappy hackers compete with Facebook and Google to recruit top talent. If… Read More

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Uber’s use of Greyballing, we get the first look at the rumored Amazon Echo device and Facebook shuts down its VR filmmaking division. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

Facebook gets a lot of flack for just reinforcing your world views in its News Feed echo chamber instead of challenging your opinions. That’s because you choose exactly which friends and Pages to follow. But Facebook’s newest feature could bring a wider range of sources to your News Feeds. Read More

WhatsApp is back up after suffering an outage that affected users around the world for hours. The Facebook-owned messaging service confirmed in a media statement that it had been inaccessible, but did not say why. Read More

Microsoft’s new Surface laptop gets released and it costs $999.00, YouTube gets a new redesign with support for dark mode, Facebook denies allegation of gender bias and a beekeeper builds a deep learning app to save the bees. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

Facebook’s role in spreading news, especially fake news, has been in the spotlight since last year’s presidential election. Now it’s promoting Alex Hardiman to lead its news efforts on the product side. Hardiman worked at The New York Times, most recently as vice president of news products, until joining Facebook last year. Read More

Silicon Valley is a bubble. Go into any SoMa coffee shop and you’ll hear founders and investors alike singing the praises of Hyperloop and flying cars — sci-fi tropes reincarnated by billionaires with a god complex. This isn’t to say these technologies shouldn’t be pursued, but sometimes it’s healthy to remember that we are effectively pulling a Facebook… Read More